Hi guys,
I'm looking for some help in designing a database schema. Im planning to build my own online clothing store selling t-shirts, jeans, sneakers, tops etc. Mainly clothing but also some other cool bits, for an idea of the sort of products I plan to sell check out http://krudmart.com/.
I have some database design experience from my software engineering degree but thought I'd try and get some advice as I try to come up with a good design.
My basic issue is handling the various attributes my products could have. I plan to have a fair amount of detail for each product and need a searchable, scalable, efficient way of handling this.
My main problem is that different products will have different attributes that i need to record.
E.G. T-shirts will have dimensions that i need to record such as length, width, neck width etc as well as other attributes such as colour, they might also have a variable number of images associated with them as some t-shirts have more details that need to be shown
Jeans/trousers might need attributes such as waist size, length, material
trainers might need uk size, us size, euro size, colour scheme
*MY THOUGHTS*
One way i thought of approaching this is to have a high level products table with attributes common to all products - price, sku, category, onSale
And then have sub-tables for more specific product types such as a t-shirts table, trousers table, trainers table
My other thought is the possibly of using XML within the database, I plan to develop this in .Net and SQL Server as I have to use these technologies at work.
Any ideas or useful material will be massively appreciated!
Cheers
Sam